Page 134 of Angels Are Falling

STEFAN

It took me six days to get an audience with the man who had bought my life. I looked terrible, red eyes, scruffy beard, calling a phone that never answered, standing in his office lobby where security had learned my face days ago. So I did the thing I was apparently good at now. I used the private investigator’s last report—the one that came with Kai’s weekly schedule—and I waited for him on a public street. He came out of the trustees’ building at four forty p.m., alone, coat open, and saw me before I’d stepped off the curb.

Of course he did. He has never once in his life been surprised by me.

“Give them back to me.” I hadn’t planned an opening. Six days of rehearsing, and that was what survived.

He glanced at me, bored, and then walked leisurely toward the black car that was already waiting for him, engine running, door open.

“Kai. Please.” I dogged his steps. He didn’t bother slowing down. “Whatever money you spent on me, I’ll return it with interest. I’ll resign from the magazine. Take back the house. Your lawyers can draft any agreement, and I’ll sign without reading. Just give me back my family.”

He looked at me for a long moment, the street moving around us like we were furniture. His brows raised slowly, mocking me. “You speak as if I’m holding them hostage.”

You are. You put a spell on them.

“They won’t see me right now,” I whispered. I was a broken man, robbed of everything that mattered.

“I’m not stopping them.”

I ignored his free will sentiment because, no matter what he said, he was the only one who could give them back to me. “We both know you’re the only one who can fix this. You can ask Amelie to return my calls. She said I can’t see the kids either, not without a social worker present to supervise the visits. She won’t see me, but she’ll listen to you if you talk to her.”

That made Kai laugh. I saw red but gritted my teeth to keep from screaming. Antagonizing him had gotten me nowhere. I was at this man’s mercy, and he knew it, too.

“You have everything in the world, Kai. Money. Power. Connections. You’re the fucking Prince of Darster. I’m nobody. Amelie and the kids are all I have in this world. Please don’t take what little I have from me.”

His dark eyes went over my shoulder and fixed on the middle distance. The last time his eyes had done that, it had cost me everything. So, I turned around.

The billboard stood three stories over the intersection, so new that the crew was still folding up their lift beneath it. My own face looked back at me—camera in hand, my good side, Lucy’s best work—over five words.

THE NEW PRINCE OF DARSTER.

The street rat had become the prince. Fifteen-year-old me would have wept at the sight of it. Twenty-four-year-old me cringed.

“I wish to be the Prince of Darster.” Kai returned my own words to me. “That’s what you said. I asked what you wanted from our arrangement, and you didn’t ask for your wife or your family. You looked me in the eye and asked for that.” He nodded at the billboard.

I turned back around. “Kai⁠—”

He tossed a folder against my chest. My hands caught it on reflex.

“The board of trustees signed off on it today,” he said. “I was going to have my lawyers send this over, but now’s as good a time as any. Everyone in this town watched me buy it out from under them. The real estate. The mall, the cafes, and the restaurants. Sixty-two businesses and the land under all of them.” He nodded at the folder. “Open it.”

I opened it. Deeds. Transfer instruments. Page after page after page, executed, notarized, stamped. And on every single one, in the box where his name should have been, was mine.

“It was never for you,” I said, dumbfounded. All this time, Kai had been working on buying this town, and it had all been for me. “You were buying it for me.”

“So you could own this town and become the Prince of Darster. That’s what you wished for in exchange for fulfilling my wish.”

The wind took the top three pages off the stack and carried them down the sidewalk, and I watched a stranger step on my property without breaking stride.

“Take inventory.” He straightened his cuff, unhurried, a man closing a meeting. “Owner of a travel magazine. Ruby Sarafina wants you. And now, you own the town itself.” A beat. “I have made all your wishes come true.”

“I don’t want any of it.”

He had the gall to look irritated. “Don’t be a bad sport after the fact.”

“I don’t want it.” The folder was shaking. It took me a second to understand it was my hands. “Keep all of this and return my wife to me.”

Kai Cavendish laughed.